Daniel Pearl Act would shine light on overlooked abuses

This week CPJ congratulated the House sponsors of a bill
that would expand the breadth and depth of the State Department's annual
reporting to Congress on press freedom abuses worldwide. The Daniel Pearl
Freedom of the Press Act passed
the House last month; now the bill is being redrafted for the Senate by the
Committee on Foreign Relations. CPJ, in the July 8 letter to Reps. Adam Schiff
(D-CA) and Mick Pence (R-IN), who are also co-chairs of the Congressional
Caucus for Freedom of the Press, urged the Senate to pass the legislation appropriately
named after the late Wall Street Journal reporter.

Pearl's
abduction and murder more than seven years ago chilled the
most hardened foreign correspondents. But even an act that hideous is not the
only one of its kind. No less than four months later a senior TV Globo
correspondent in Brazil,
Tim Lopes, was abducted as he was investigating criminal activities in a
shantytown, or favela, in Rio de
Janiero. Committing a series of offenses
that may well have been intended to echo Pearl's
Pakistani-based execution, Lopes' captors gave the Brazilian journalist a mock
trial and sentenced him to death, before beheading him with a sword and burying
his burned body parts in a clandestine cemetery.

The murders of these two highly respected journalists are
hardly rare. At least 532 journalists have been murdered in direct reprisal for
their reporting since 1992, according to figures
compiled by CPJ. This number excludes journalists killed by stepping on a
landmine, or being shot in a conflict zone, or being blown up in a suicide bombing.In fact, for every journalist killed during
the heat of armed combat, unlike what many Hollywood
films might suggest, nearly three journalists are murdered in cold blood. Only
six of the journalists murdered worldwide since 1992 have been U.S. citizens like Pearl. The overwhelming majority--490 of them--have
been local journalists who were murdered while pursuing stories within their
own nations.

Many people have heard of the Russian investigative reporter
Anna
Politkovskaya who was murdered in her Moscow
apartment building in 2006. But how many people have heard of, say, Uma
Singh, a Nepalese radio reporter and women's rights activist who was
stabbed to death this year in January by about 15 unidentified assailants in her
home, or of Eliseo
Barrón Hernández, a Mexican newspaperman who was beaten by hooded gunmen in
May in front of his family before being abducted to have his tortured corpse
discovered the next day, or of Mukhtar
Mohamed Hirabe, a Somali radio reporter who was shot repeatedly in the head
last month by unknown gunmen as he and a colleague, who was also wounded, were
walking to work.

Moreover the murderers get away with it in nearly nine out
of 10 cases; CPJ's latest impunity figure for journalist murders since 1992 is 88.7 percent. Another great threat to
journalists worldwide, as CPJ noted this week in the letter to Reps. Schiff and
Pence, is the common incarceration of journalists for doing their jobs: No fewer
than 125 journalists were in
prison around the world as of December 1, 2008. Nearly half of those
imprisoned are online
journalists; they are now detained more often than journalists working in
any other medium. China, Cuba,
Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan were the top five
jailers among the 29 nations that imprison journalists.

Unfortunately, the United States remains on the list. CPJ
has challenged the U.S.
military's open-ended detention of journalists and media workers in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and GuantanamoBay. In January, CPJ sent a letter
to Obama asking him to abolish "the practice of detaining journalists for prolonged
periods without due process [to] send a clear signal that the United States
upholds its longstanding commitment to free expression. "

China
just finally dropped from the top of the list after a 10-year stretch as the
world's worst jailer of journalists. Not because China has released all 28
journalists it was holding
in jail at CPJ's last count in December 2008. But because Iran, in the
wake of the crackdown on election results last month, has recently jailed
dozens of journalists including 30, according to CPJ's count this week, who
remain behind bars. The tiny nation of Eritrea on the African Horn has the
dishonorable distinction of being the world's worst
per capita jailer of journalists with 13 incarcerated (all of whom, like
other dissidents there, have been held incommunicado for nearly eight years) in
a nation of fewer than 6 million people.

The Daniel Pearl Act would compel the State Department to
cover all kinds of press freedom abuses "including direct physical
attacks, imprisonment, indirect sources of pressure, and censorship by
governments, military, intelligence, or police forces, criminal groups, or
armed extremist or rebel groups." But the act would further require Foggy
Bottom to explain "what steps the government of each such country has
taken to preserve the safety and independence of the media, and to ensure the
prosecution of those individuals who attack or murder journalists."

That would be a step forward, indeed. The Daniel Pearl Act
passed the House as part of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act. The Senate
Foreign Relations Committee may hold
hearings on the legislation before the August recess, according to CPJ
sources, and bring the act to the Senate floor later this year.